Application Level Cybersecurity Threat Detection

Resilience to evolving cybersecurity threats continues to be a high priority across Navy tactical and nontactical systems. Protecting these systems is a complex, daunting, technology challenge. Presently, a multilayered, defense-in-depth strategy is used to identify cyber-attacks and protect the core assets of a system, namely its data, from being compromised. Existing security tools and practices are necessary components of a defense-in-depth strategy but not necessarily sufficient to identify and mitigate the impact of exploiting application’s vulnerabilities. Recognizing the opportunities these challenges provide, our adversaries have turned their attention to exploiting vulnerabilities associated with the Application Layer.Our proposed approach, called Application CyberSensors, builds upon defacto industry security practices and development of a Domain Specific Language to auto-generate software to proactively identify and detect cyberattacks at the Application Layer and respond to them in real-time. Key to our approach is the ability to seamlessly auto-generate, integrate, and deploy the software sensors without modifying existing software applications. Our “No Code/Low-Code” approach extends a previously developed tool that successfully demonstrated the ability to auto-generate communications software for use in a Navy tactical environment. Streamlining development by eliminating the need to manually develop software was proven to significantly reduce time and cost.